Reader Jeremy Rosenblatt blows the whistle on a situation in which Microsoft’s widely used Windows Update routine finds no updates to install – even when there are clearly many patches needed by a machine.

“The behavior would not cause a typical user to suspect a problem,” Rosenblatt writes, “as Microsoft provides no hint that an error has occurred.” I’ll let him tell the rest of the story:

“The cause of the issue is that if a machine has its date set to something outside of the valid range of the SSL certificate on MS’s WinUpdate site, WinUpdate will get an SSL error. Instead of reporting it in some intelligible manner, WinUpdate simply reports, ‘There are no updates available for your computer. Please check back later’ (with no error message at all).

“Only if you then click on the ‘See Also/Windows Update Catalog’ do you get a clue that there might be an error involved. And even then it isn’t obvious what’s going on. You get an error page, but the only troubleshooting tip is a mailto tag that formats an e-mail to MS with ‘ERROR 0x800A138F’ in the subject line.

“It’s easy to try for yourself. Just change your machine’s date to 2001, open a fresh instance of IE and go to Windows Update.

“It should also occur if you use the WinUpdate Start menu icon, although there’s some possibility you may need to reboot after the date change.”

This scenario would most likely occur when someone was setting up a PC for the first time and its internal clock hadn’t yet been configured. But it can also happen to many longtime users who aren’t too fastidious about their computer’s date and time settings.

After Rosenblatt wrote in about this, the problem was quickly added to the WinUpdate troubleshooting page. But since a clear error message is never displayed to affected users, they might go quite a long time without critical updates – and never think to look for a troubleshooting note.

I wrote in the May 8 issue of Brian’s Buzz that Windows XP with Service Pack 1 suffers heavy performance problems after you install a patch Microsoft released on April 16. (This patch is known as MS03-013.)

Microsoft officially acknowledged this and subsequently revised its security bulletin on May 28 to announce a new patch. The new update “corrects the performance issues that some customers experienced,” the company says.

The new bulletin advises that companies may not want to install MS03-013 unless they are having the specific problem that needs to be patched. The security weakness allows an intruder to gain administrator privileges, but he or she would have to enjoy physical access to a machine to achieve this. I’d agree that the patch may not be necessary for most companies. More infoOther significant bulletins:

How quickly would you know one of your servers had died? FREEping 2.0 is a new version of a free utility released last month that will ping your Windows 2003, 2000, or NT 4 SP3 servers – or any IP address in the world, for that matter. You define the testing interval, and FREEping (which otherwise runs silently in the background) sends you a pop-up message when a machine stops responding. Available from Advanced Toolware. More info

InnerReg controls startup programs for you Developer Naram Cheez has released InnerReg 1.0, a free utility that manages any programs that start automatically when you run Windows. His tool lets you control each of the six stages of the startup process, including programs that are launched by lines in the Registry rather than the Startup folder. More info...

The crazy guys at ZUG (which bills itself as “the world’s only comedy site”) have pulled off a major prank, proving that no one at retail stores even bothers to check that the signature on a charge slip actually matches the one on the back of the credit card. John Hargrave, who remarks that his normal signature looks like it was written by “an unusually talented chicken,” signed his charge slips as Shakespeare, Jesus, Porky Pig (at Disneyland), etc., and no one batted an eye. He says he’s thinking of legally changing his name to “I Stole This Card.” But I’ll stop right there because you really have to read this hilarious tale for yourself. The Credit Card Prank

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